CAT | Analytics / Tracking

There has been some chatter about upgrades to Google Analytics planned for 2013. There are a few opportunities that may present themselves and a few issues that could arise from the possible changes.

People ask us all the time, How can I track the value of a lead generated online when they are buying in the store. This was something that we solved using Yahoo web analytics. When the lead was generated it received a customer id number, the information of that customer is stored with their permission and if a sale occurred the revenue was attributed to the marketing channel or channels in a multi channel attribution model. The ability to upload revenue tracked from a CRM like salesforce allowed our clients to make informed budgetary and strategic decisions. This is the case with many brick an mortar stores, businesses that require quotes, or any business that you cannot assign a given value to each lead.

Googles new regarding Universal analytics can be seen here. The basic news reveals google’s plan to allow the ability to track across multiple devices as long as the user is signed in from that device, the ability to sync online and offline data, and an increased ability to track Mobile Application analytics. It will allow users to create custom dimensions as well, such as store visits and so on.

The opportunities to pair mobile app metrics, location information, crm data and attribute revenue to each impression or visit will open up another niche of mobile and brick and mortar marketing and could mean big changes in analytics for showroomer’s and lead generation marketing alike. The insight into quality of lead generated will allow users to make excellent decisions on budgets, impression frequency, channels used and collect ROI data that is unavailable without being hindered by technology costs.

This move make sense as Google most likely wants to continue to make landing page testing available to the general public… but with one caveat: Install Google Analytics.

This increases the number of new non-adwords subscribers to Google Analytics. Meanwhile, for all AdWords advertisers who are not yet using Google Analytics, forcing them to install and utilize their platform in order to a/b testing moving forward. The brains at Google really know how to herd some cattle…

The main questions we hear with any social media campaign reporting are,”What is the value?” and “Was it profitable?”. Since attribution analytics are still evolving and the number of visits prior to a conversion is increasing, providing a concrete value for any social media campaign becomes more important.

The PPC advantage to Social Media Marketing:

In the CPC model we can see exactly what the cost of a visit is and the end value of the cumulative visits are. We can definitively say that there is a minimum ROI of x percent and this is (or in some cases is not) profitable. There are a few visitors who’s conversions may not be tracked accurately due to a few factors:

1. Call in sales (if call tracking isn’t utilized)

2. Purchase from a separate IP address

3. Return customers that experienced a sales cycle which is longer than the duration of the PPC cookie.

4. Wrongful attribution. Attributing a conversion that started with a sponsored click, to a different “last click” referrer.

Aside from these, there are not many questions in regards to where a PPC conversion came from. Call Tracking is a solution for this first issue and some analytics software such as Yahoo web analytics (was Index tools) can show the behavior of past visits leading up to the final click and can answer many questions about keyword and referrer attribution.

However, in the case of social media a different set of questions go unanswered. The main issues that exist in tracking social media efforts are:

1. What is the value of a visit driven by any social media source? This does not mean visitors or mentions. It means actual value.

2. How do my visitor’s interact with my site, movie’s, apps or events? Does this interaction correlate to conversions and sales?

3. Is my social media marketing driving direct sales or is it even assisting future sales?

4. What social media channel’s drive’s sales?

5. Are the behaviors of visitors from different channels unique?

6. What content works and what content fails? How do we determine success and failure?

7. How are visitors reacting to this content away from the site?

Google Analytics is taking a shot to assist marketers in answering these questions by rolling out a Social Reporting platform. With this platform you will be able to compare social behavior and it’s correlation to conversions to make inferences on the effect on the bottom line. You will also be able to use a referrer string to find whether there are direct sales and assisted sales coming from your social media efforts. The key to this reporting is the social report referral code from a particular social media channel, event tracking and the value of the conversion which is associated with the given goal.

While this report will not be available to everyone for another few weeks in Google’s estimation, you can get a head start by making sure all of your event tracking codes, social interaction analytics codes, goals and goal values are set up. It’s also important to recognize that this will not provide a complete detailed view of profit generated but should bring Social Media one step closer to having detailed profit and analytic reporting. It’s no wonder that this was rolled out after Google+ has had a chance to grow a bit and we expect it to increase the ability for marketers to place a value on Social efforts.

Have you been placing a value on your social media efforts and results? If so how did you determine success and failure of a given campaign?

Please let us know with your comments and give us a like, +1, RT or follow to help us test the new reports!

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